


Crystal in Winter Sunlight

by utlaginn



Series: Amorevole [8]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Arguing, Banter, Coffee, Emotional Sex, Established Relationship, Fancy Restaurants, Flirting, Ice Skating, Late Night Conversations, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, New York City, Phichit the selfie master, Post-Canon, Relationship Study, Sightseeing, St. Petersburg, Switching, Valencia, Wine, World Travel, a surprising amount of blushing, koseki, timeline jumps, victor making sappy gestures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-04 14:23:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10280768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/utlaginn/pseuds/utlaginn
Summary: Sometimes Victor thinks he’s learned each of Yuuri’s faces, each color and shade. But Yuuri keeps surprising him.Yuuri’s multifaceted existence, as experienced by Victor.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Image Music: Prokofiev, Lieutenant Kijé: [Romance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1scluzlPz0).
> 
> Part slice-of-life time-jump, part character study. Pure homage to Victor’s depth of character and his utter adoration of Yuuri.
> 
> [Art by Johanna](http://intothevoidofarts.deviantart.com/gallery/62398164/Crystal-in-Winter-Sunlight-Katsudon-Mini-Bang-2017).

_April 2017_

“Watch out!”

Yuuri grabs him by the forearm, and then he’s tilting forward as well—and but for his alarming lower-body strength, he and Victor would both be diving teeth-first toward the concrete. Victor stares down at the sidewalk, at the offending frozen puddle. He wonders for a second what Yakov would say if he showed up to one of their last practices before World’s with a broken nose.

Probably something like, _It’ll suit your image as Russia’s returning fuck-up_.

“Did it get below freezing last night?” he asks, staring the solid water down as he slowly rights himself.

Yuuri readjusts his scarf higher up his ears. “Think so.”

Victor makes a face. “But it’s April.”

He only hears a second later how close his voice gets to a whine. So he forgives Yuuri when he laughs at him.

“It’s your city, not mine – it’s useless to complain to me,” Yuuri says, burrowing against his side again, propelling them both forward along the sidewalk. “Let’s go find that coffee.”

Victor nods, and a trickle of cold air finds its way down the back of his collar. He shivers. “Coffee.”

Yuuri nudges him, his own teeth chattering. Victor is tempted to wind an arm around him and squeeze. But they’re walking so fast, now, Yuuri will probably just chide him for making a fall more likely.

Instead of trying to keep him warm, then, Victor takes in the morning, accepts all its concrete reminders that he’s here, he’s awake, he’s alive: thick black cables crisscrossed along the narrow patch of dust blue sky. City smelling like wet asphalt and the Moyka. Yuuri slowly but surely waking up to it all.

His lover is on a mission: a quest for caffeine. Perhaps the most worthy of goals before seven a.m. Growing brighter by the second, his eyes dart from sign to sign as they pass shopfronts along the sidewalk.

Whenever they’ve forgotten to buy beans for the French press, they treat themselves to coffee at the cafe Yurachka had once (rightly) demanded they visit. Yuuri’d had no problem letting Victor convince him to do things the European way. They buy only as much food prep as they need for two or three days; and they consistently underestimate how much organic coffee they will have to grind in the mornings. “It’s not like getting groceries at Costco, I guess,” Yuuri had commented, once—and had then had to explain to Victor what a bulk grocery store membership was all about.

Yuuri still can’t read Cyrillic other than to recognize the names of the streets where the practice rink is, and where Victor’s—their—apartment is. But he knows the look of the sun-faded sign above the tiny cafe that has become theirs.

(At one point, when Yuuri had been in the city a few weeks and Victor felt he was comfortable enough to tease, Victor had said to him of the morning’s coffee, “You can’t have it unless you can order it in Russian.” Victor had only tried that game once; he was afraid Yuuri was actually going to punch him if he did it again. He was willing to brush past the homicidal look he got, knowing that the game only killed Yuuri because he hates to be bad at anything.)

Victor looks down at Yuuri while trying to keep one eye on the slippery concrete. Yuuri looks back up at him. Even the shot of adrenaline from their almost-fall hasn’t undone the hooded look Yuuri wears every morning: that look that only coffee—or, almost as often, being late—can undo.

“Are you okay?” Yuuri asks. Victor loves how his voice sounds, just this side of overworked: like shouting at Victor to pay attention had been a little too much for 6:39 in the morning. “I thought ‘getting so distracted that you fall’ was my department…”

Victor snorts—more at himself than at Yuuri’s self-depreciation—and the air puffs delicate and white from his nose and upward. “Sorry. I was thinking about-”

He catches himself. There’s a surprise in store for Yuuri, provided he doesn’t remember what day it is, and Victor will be damned if he ruins it himself.

Victor smiles at Yuuri when he raises an eyebrow at Victor’s hesitation. “I was thinking about the time,” Victor half-lies. “That soon it’s not going to be our season, anymore.”

Slowly, Yuuri nods his agreement. “I guess. It’ll be time for a break after World’s.”

Victor nods along.

It may not have been what he was thinking about; but it _is_ something he’s often pondered: the timing of the skating season. It’s the most synchronistic thing about them being creatures of the ice. The ephemeral nature of their profession always becomes that much more evident to him in the spring, as the ice melts away into subtle green, into the sunshine and the mud and the inconsistency of springtime.

Ironic, that in the spring, skaters are usually at their most still.

Yuuri, at least, is not still yet. Having made up his mind that Victor is fine, he barrels ahead, making up for the difference in the length of their strides with pure determination. His shoulders are hunched inward, but the openness of his face, above the light blue of the cashmere scarf Victor bought him for Valentine’s Day, is stunning. Against the soft, pale light of early spring, Yuuri is all contrast.

He’s such a pretty thing, Victor thinks. He probably won’t tell Yuuri this, but he’s the reason Victor almost tripped over that half-frozen puddle. He’s often distracted by all the incongruity Yuuri embodies. The way he looked at Victor a year ago, versus the way—the ways—he looks at Victor now…

A pretty, young, reactive thing; still roused to the heights of passion by the prospect of coffee that isn’t grocery-store bought. Victor can discern the exact shade of enthusiasm, despite the glare against the lenses of Yuuri’s glasses. His eyes are all but lit up by excitement and by sunlight, glinting with its winter slant.

Yuuri turns to him. Victor jumps a little at being caught. As he cocks his head with still-sleepy exasperation, Yuuri asks, “What are you staring at?”

“You,” Victor answers.

Alright, well. Maybe he will tell him.

Both of them expect Victor to answer that way, regardless—but Victor isn’t sure how Yuuri will react to it. Is it one of those mornings where he will blush and remind Victor that _they’re in public_? One of those mornings where he’ll glide into the flirtation the way he glides into an Ina Bauer?

Instead, Yuuri blinks at him; and then all remaining concern evaporates. He grins, and lightly says, “That’s so cheesy.”

Victor joins him in laughter.

He noticed it from the very start. How many different faces the younger skater has. Victor was familiar with him before the Grand Prix Final in Sochi, of course, but it was the type of name-to-face match necessary for any professional. But at Sochi, Victor saw him first so downcast he flat out ran away from Victor’s friendly photo suggestion, and then, the next night, so alive it caught the whole room alight. And then to see him skate his own routine with so much… what was it, vulnerability…?

They make it to their shop. The old lady behind the counter, forearms covered in flour and face lighting up in recognition, welcomes them as she does every visit. Victor grabs their regular drinks while Yuuri stakes out a little table by the shop’s front window.

In general, Victor makes it a rule not to sit “in companionable silence.” But sitting in silence with Yuuri is something he hopes to be able to do every morning for the rest of his life. It gives him a chance to reach across the table while Yuuri smiles lightly, indulgently; to run his thumb ever so lightly against the back of Yuuri’s hand, where it clutches around the heat of the paper coffee cup. Gives him a chance observe: how Yuuri’s back is partially to the window, setting his features against the dawn, dark in profile; how Yuuri stirs at his already well-mixed coffee. No sugar—that would be a waste of calories—but a little bit of milk. He only started drinking it that way in Detroit, Victor has learned, since neither coffee nor dairy were staples around the Katsuki family home.

“You know…” Yuuri breaks the silence. Victor picks his head up. “It was a year ago today that you moved to Hasetsu.”

Victor gives a little gasp that is almost disappointment. So Yuuri does remember the date. But he manages to spin the exhale into an acknowledgement.

It’s things like this. Little morning vulnerabilities that Victor finds himself craving with physical hunger. Sometimes it’s saccharine endearments that Yuuri will only tolerate until he’s awake enough to analyze them. Sometimes it’s a train of thought from Yuuri’s dreams—which, Victor has learned, Yuuri almost always remembers. This morning, his craving to know Yuuri ever more deeply is certainly satisfied. Victor knows Yuuri is emotional, one of the most expressive people in his vast acquaintance. But only now is he coming to appreciate the depth of Yuuri’s sentimentality.

The only person who can surpass it, in fact, might be Victor himself—who has dinner reservations later that night, at a very nice place, as a surprise for Yuuri.

Victor grins.

“It’s cute that you remember the date.”

Yuuri only now looks up. “Of course I do. You showed up unannounced, with your _dog_ , and seven dozen moving boxes, and- and stood up out of the onsen like some…”

And Victor’s grin widens. “Like some what?”

Trepidation slides heavy over Yuuri’s face.

Victor knows he must be using that look he’s only ever worn when teasing a member of the press, because Yuuri seems not only concerned, now, but pale. Victor continues, “Like some Russian demigod, so gorgeous and alluring you couldn’t help but throw yourself into his presence-”

“Y-you threw yourself at _me_ , you-”

Victor’s mouth drops open on faux shock. “Yuuri, that’s a lie and you know it. You were the one who did all the throwing!”

Standing up from the little round table, Yuuri has apparently had his caffeine fix.

Victor, not at all put out, grins and stands up with him. “I thought we were drinking it here.”

Yuuri doesn’t even turn around to give Victor his non-answer. “We’re going to be late.”

“We’re not going to be late,” Victor mutters. Yuuri glares back at him. Still, to ham it up before he has to reel in the self-applause—in favor of gritting his teeth against the newly felt freezing—Victor adds, “Anyway, you know you started it. One year ago, you were keeping the demigod at bay, but that only enticed him further. It only enflamed his hunger for you, his shy but beautiful follower-”

“ _Stop_ it.”

Yuuri reaches back and shoves at him—and Victor just laughs, as Yuuri steps out of the shop and doesn’t hold the door open for him.

 

***

_December 2016_

Yuuri rises from his eleventh place finish in last year’s Japanese Nationals to first place, and no one is surprised. Certainly not his little fanboy Minami, whose Instagram account becomes one long string of effusive praise and grainy shots of Yuuri’s quad flip. And least of all Victor—who FaceTimes him between events at the Russian Nationals, as Yuuri sits at the kiss and cry in Osaka. 

Victor is even less surprised when Yuuri calls him at four o’clock in the morning St. Petersburg time, and panics for twelve minutes straight about his morning meeting with the JSF and their plans to send him to Pyeongchang in 2018.

“Well of course you’re their first choice,” Victor says eventually, when he can hear that Yuuri has stopped to breathe. He rubs his hand over his eyes, sitting up finally and swinging his legs out from under the blankets. He taps his toes against the cold hardwood, muzzy but wanting to keep Yuuri engaged in the conversation. Most of all, he doesn’t want his fiancé to spin off into his own thoughts, without the anchor that Victor can (usually) provide, so he adds, “Remember how excited you were when we talked about that being a possibility? Since you’re not retiring…”

“Yeah,” Yuuri’s voice catches. And not for the first time since they parted—temporarily—in the middle of December, Victor wishes he didn’t have to actually be _in_ Russia to skate in the Russian Nationals. “But that was when it was _hypothetical_.”

Victor thinks he can help calm him, even without the physical contact they’ve come to rely upon. But he knows he can’t do it with empty platitude. And as it is, they’re a twelve-hour flight apart; it’s still dark outside; and Victor still isn’t perfect at handling Yuuri’s episodes.

So while he means it as a compliment when he says it—

“I like this about you. You adapt. You were confident the last time we talked about it, and you should’ve been. But you’re not letting it make you cocky, now.”

Yuuri takes it as an insult.

“…So I don’t have any reason to be cocky.”

Victor’s brow furrows, and he tries to smooth it back into a neutral expression that Yuuri won’t be able to hear over the phone. “That’s not what I said.”

He can _feel_ Yuuri bristle from four thousand, seven hundred miles away. “But that’s what you mean.”

Trying to speak evenly, Victor corrects, “ _No_. I’m saying you adjust. And you should. You react to the situation as you see it and that’s one of the things that makes you so great at expression.”

“Which is exactly why sending me to the _Olympics_ is a bad idea.”

“You’ve been in plenty of international competitions, you know how to-”

“But _everyone_ watches the Olympics!” Yuuri says—and, Victor has to concede, he’s not wrong. Not everyone watches the Grand Prix or the Four Continents; but most households in the world tune in to the Winter Olympics for at least a night or two. “And if I’m too unpredictable to handle it, how am I supposed to represent Japan?”

“The way you have done a dozen times before.”

Victor hears the way Yuuri’s teeth are bared when he says, “It’s not the same.”

“It _is_ the same. I can tell you personally, from experience, it’s the same.”

“It’s not.”

Victor presses his knuckles to his forehead, closes his eyes, halfway between pride at how Yuuri doesn’t back down for fear of insulting Victor, and irritation at Yuuri’s refusal to be comforted.

“Yuuri,” he says, trying not to sigh into the phone. He picks his way across his apartment, turning on lights in his wake, to his kitchen in search of tea. “I love you—you know I love you, but I don’t know how to help you from here if you are determined to be upset about this.”

Yuuri next deep breath is almost a gasp.

It’s an exhausting fight, especially for their temporarily—momentarily, _fleetingly_ , Victor reminds himself—long-distance relationship.

While Yuuri is an introverted thinker, keeping things in until he knows exactly how he wants to say (or skate) them, Victor is extroverted with his observations. His emotional reactions, too.

As polished as he’s had to become for the international stage, Victor isn’t one to describe his emotions with words. No eloquent articulation, or pretty lines on paper; all that seems useless when emotions are supposed be _felt_. Even those observing from the outside ought to feel, not analyze. He can name his emotions, of course—and like Yuuri, he can skate them without filter.

So tonight, Victor figures that whatever the problem was, it was in his delivery. In that inability to vocalize.

The thousands of miles and mistranslated words between them are making him fuzzy. The late hour—early hour?—is making him fuzzy. And as the conversation goes on, he can’t remember exactly how he worded it, can’t fathom how Yuuri took his wonder, however poorly expressed, and spun it so that in his mind, Victor was calling him unpredictable.

It probably could have been more eloquently said. Victor knows that’s true without even recalling exactly what it was he did say—without knowing how the sentiment translated from Russian thought into English phonemes and again into Japanese introspection. He doesn’t mince words with Yuuri—doesn’t mince words with anyone—but it still makes him feel helpless to know that he can control only bits of the translation process. But whatever words he’d used, he’d meant them, sincerely, as admiration.

What makes Victor happy, has always made him happy, is growth, is change, is meeting and surpassing impossible challenges. That’s the core of surprise. Yuuri embodies that like no one else.

And eventually, through the four-in-the-morning shadows and the transcontinental connection, he’s able to explain.

He meant only this:

That he loves the multiple facets of Yuuri’s personality, all the faces that shine and go dark in crystalline patterns. He loves that now that he knows the cut of him, he can predict what faces will light up when he turns Yuuri in a particular direction. The unpredictability, of course, comes from the fact that he isn’t the only one who can do that. Who can turn Yuuri against a different background, toward a difference source of light. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s beautiful, because it’s exciting. Surprising. Victor can conjecture, but he can’t always foresee what parts of him will light up.

The language barrier makes it hard to articulate as poetically as he wants to. But Yuuri seems to understand.

Victor won’t let Yuuri hang up the phone until he’s cried-out, exhausted but sincere as he tries to thank Victor for being there. Victor rejects the gratitude as redundant; he’s Yuuri’s coach, still, and his partner, always.

“Will you-” Yuuri starts. Then Victor can hear the way he presses his lips over his teeth to stop himself.

Victor coaxes, “Will I what?”

The younger man breathes roughly, the static crackling over the receiver. He’s open, vulnerable, now. More likely to tell Victor the unvarnished truth. “Will you be able to keep doing this? Support me and yourself?”

Victor smiles, even though what he wants to do it reach out across the time zones and shake Yuuri. “Have you ever known me to say I can do something when I can’t?”

Yuuri takes a long pause. “…You told Yurio you’d give him the best senior debut ever and then you became my coach instead.”

Victor coats his answer in flippant self-congratulation. “And did he or did he not break a world record via a routine that _I_ choreographed for him?”

“Well.” Yuuri laughs. “You also told me you’d make me win the Grand Prix Final.”

“ _Yuu_ ri-”

“Just…” Yuuri is still chuckling, but it’s all air, all breath. “Don’t keep doing this if it’s going to exhaust you, don’t…”

Victor goes to take a deep breath. But it catches in his throat when, on a cracked whisper, Yuuri concludes, “Don’t get tired of me.”

And it breaks Victor’s heart.

He doesn’t quite manage to muffle the devastated sigh that escapes around his answer of: “Never.”

It would be impossible to grow tired of someone who is such a constant surprise. It’s easiest to see it on the ice, of course, but Victor can pick out a dozen other ways Yuuri has branched out, surprising Victor and himself, in the nine months since Victor became his coach.

Just one irony of the figure-skating world—their world of ice and metal—is that those who stay still don’t usually survive. Those who can’t let in the green of new growth won’t sparkle, in their frozen reality.

Several weeks later, in St. Petersburg, Mila makes a similar observation as they all begin to prepare for World’s.

“He walks so small. For someone who takes up so much room on the ice, he takes up so little off of it.”

Her blue eyes track Yuuri’s step sequence, and Victor gives her metaphor a sidelong smile. “Just wait until he’s comfortable. One day you’ll look at him and he’ll be the tallest one here.”

 

***

_November 2017_

Victor is going to frame the selfie that Phichit takes of himself and Yuuri through Mikhailovsky Garden’s spiraling wrought-iron gate and he is going to put it on their mantel. Granted, it’s an apartment and they don’t have a mantel—so first Victor is going to have a mantel built, and then he’s going to put that selfie on it.

The boy is an artist.

Standing on the cobblestone several paces behind the chattering friends, Victor peers down into the Snap that had popped up on his phone with the (somewhat loaded) caption, “He looks happier here than in any other picture I’ve taken with him.” Victor notes the way the gentle curl of metal accentuates the curve of Phichit’s outstretched arm, the way it exaggerates the fullness of Yuuri’s smile. And it’s silly to feel nostalgic for the skating season: for its camaraderie and for the way it manifests dozens of forms of love, when they’re directly in the middle of it. But Victor does.

Phichit has finally come to visit Yuuri in Russia. Both of the younger men were placed at the Rostelecom Cup (gold and silver, respectively—they’re tied one-and-one, now). The Thai skater had headed back with them by train to St. Petersburg; he’s never been, and he was fascinated by the countryside between Moscow and their city by the Baltic Sea.

Yuuri wouldn’t hear of his best friend getting a hotel; but in terms of payback for their spare room, Yuuri’s best friend does not disappoint. Not only is Victor treated to the best photos of Yuuri he has seen in the last year—and he _lives_ with the man—Phichit peppers their conversation with intimate details of Yuuri’s pre-Victor life. In particular, stories about Detroit—which Yuuri deems embarrassing but Victor deems essential.

He’s also much more excited than Yuuri has ever been about touristy things. If Victor hadn’t already been so endeared by Phichit’s sun ray of a personality, and the way it sparks against Yuuri’s, that alone would have done it.

“So what do you think?” Victor asks.

Phichit looks up at the structure before them, rising up at the end of the long garden path. He squints. First up at the building, then down at his phone.

“I think? That that is the happiest-looking building I’ve seen in Europe. With the most morbid-sounding name.”

“The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood,” Yuuri nods.

“Yuuri, tell him what it’s called in Russian!”

Yuuri just scrunches his nose at Victor and turns back to Phichit as he adds, “I think it’s called that because it’s a memorial church. You know, they built it because someone died there.”

Victor sighs. “You’re a terrible tour guide. I thought I taught you better.”

“Yeah, Yuuri,” Phichit adds. “Where’s the drama? The local flavor?”

Looking put on the spot, Yuuri tries to cover it with sarcasm. “Well I’d try the story in the local language, but I can’t say _assassinate_ in Russian.”

“Really?? That’s surprising…”

“Victor.”

Fed by Yuuri’s flat non-amusement and Phichit’s not-so-subtle laughter, Victor wheedles, “Try it, you have to know the word for ‘kill.’ Just make it fancier.”

Yuuri is already pulling Phichit along, toward the shadows under the church where the ticket booth lurks. He says, “C’mon, Vitenka!”

At first he doesn’t catch it. Victor walks after them—but then he freezes, falls back a step from the pair walking quickly away. Head cocked back by a degree, he asks, “What did you call me?”

Ahead of him, Yuuri stops. Phichit lets go of Yuuri immediately, looking a little guilty. Yuuri himself looks like he thinks he’s in trouble, like he thinks he’s offended Victor. He turns around and starts babbling.

“W-well, I can’t use the other one, the other nickname, Yakov calls you that, plus.” His eyebrows get that little crease that tells Victor he’s feeling inadequate. “It’s hard to say, Vitya-”

And it is. The shapes of Russian and Japanese match sometimes but not around the softer corners; “Vitya” becomes “Bee-chi-ya” more than anything else. Not the breath of the V, the short second syllable, “tya,” sharp like sleet. It’s still kind of adorable, the way Yuuri says it now, but…

But if Yuuri wants to give him a brand new nickname, Victor is Not Going To Complain.

“And there are so many nicknames in Russian, I was curious, and some of them are. Well. So I. Um. P-Phichit is great with languages—I mean, really excellent, if he ever retires and he’s not doing his ice show he should be a translator or something-”

“Hey, thanks Yuuri!”

“Yuuri.”

Yuuri stops talking. Victor smiles and thinks: how their relationship must have grown, if all it takes to interrupt Yuuri’s spiraling thoughts is his name in a particular tone.

Still, Yuuri’s ears go red as he continues. Phichit’s still nodding in the background as Yuuri babbles, albeit less frantically than before. “So we’ve been practicing. And. I kind of got used to referring to you that way with him, um, and-”

Victor steps to close the distance between them, reaches out to cover Yuuri’s mouth. As much as he’s given his lover a hard time today, he doesn’t want to truly embarrass him in front of a friend. Especially when he’s gotten such a nice result out of Phichit’s coming here.

“It’s cute. You can use it if you want.”

Fortunately or unfortunately, this only makes Yuuri go redder, makes him gasp underneath Victor’s palm like he can’t believe his luck.

The first selfie Phichit takes with Yuuri from the interior of the Savior is shadowy, but Yuuri’s blush is still evident. Phichit sends it to both of them as a Snap, and captions it, “lol I have definitely never been this happy to be this embarrassed.”

 

***

_December 2018_

“Winter in New York City,” Yuuri mumbles, burrowing deeper into his scarf—and into Victor’s side. “…could give winter in Moscow a run for its money.”

Victor nods. His breath comes out of his mouth in a white puff, heavy over the cashmere around his own neck, and while he’s not sure of the average temperatures, he thinks Moscow is probably colder, overall. But the chill settling around them, the chill in the shadows between the 5th Avenue skyscrapers, makes him agreeable to everything: in particular, to everything his husband says, when he’s the source of most of the warmth Victor has left in him. More than that, he’s not about to argue with him, not when the -12ºC day is like gravity, pulling Yuuri to him.

He adjusts the pack over his shoulder so he can drag Yuuri closer. As close as the bulk of winter coats and heavy backpacks will allow.

“At least we can never get assigned to NYC and end up here solo, the way we can get assigned to Moscow, huh?” he asks—innately. Teeth chattering, he wonders where his resistance to the cold has gone, where his unconquerable Russian spirit has gone. Maybe, he muses, it’s these years of warmth that have undone him. But he stops wondering when Yuuri’s head jerks up and down.

Does it matter, really, that he’s gone a little soft, if he’s got someone who is just as agreeable to Victor’s words as Victor is to his?

It’s the Christmas after the Grand Prix Final where Yuuri finally takes gold—the Christmas after the Japanese and Russian Nationals, where they both do. They’re vacationing in New York City: despite Yakov’s remonstrations that this is, probably, very likely, _undoubtedly_ Victor’s last year in competitive skating—that he he took a break last year, honeymooning with Yuuri in a slew of indulgently warm places around the globe. But this is the year he turns thirty, Victor tells himself. Tells Yakov, and Yuuri—and anyone else he thinks might be sympathetic enough to recognize the significance of the number. This is the year he absolutely _must_ indulge in the most youthful of whims, before the decades count against him.

This is the year, dammit, that he—Russia’s number one figure skater—is going to take his Japanese number one figure-skating champion of a husband to skate, like excited but very cold children, at the Rockefeller Center.

U.S. customs had been surprisingly more complicated when there was no American competition to explain their sharp-bladed shoes, but the trouble was worth it. They _have_ to visit the ice skating rink nestled into the hollow beneath 30 Rock. And lucky for them, it’s heavily trafficked with tourists; the holiday season glitters around them from every shop window, from every corner in the form of superfluous ropes of lights strung through the bare tree branches. And there are so many people, no one recognizes a random interracial couple perched at the corner of West 50 th, commenting on how unexpectedly small the rink is. No one notices when they purchase their tickets and commandeer a bench, pulling out their own skates and strapping them on in favor of the twelve-dollar rentals.

“Did you know they do engagements here?” Victor asks, plucking at the fabric over Yuuri’s elbow as he skates passed him. Over his shoulder, he says, “You can reserve the entire place, just for that.”

“We’re already married, Vitenka,” Yuuri answers, offering him a wry smile. “And anyway, I think we got engaged twenty separate times. This would have been overkill.”

Victor turns to him, skating backward—and pouting a little. “You didn’t let me do _anything_ romantic for you.”

Yuuri’s grin is more than marginally self-satisfied. “That’s because, as _you_ have pointed out, I was the one who kept asking.”

Victor keeps his lower lip where it is, but he reaches both his hands outward for Yuuri to hold. He’s not surprised—even if he is grateful—when Yuuri takes them.

A group of elementary school-aged kids skate by, then, while the two of them are too focused on finding a long, gliding rhythm together to worry about whether they’re keeping up with the flow of traffic. A little girl in braces and a puffy red coat does a double take at Victor.

“Whoa, are those gold??”

She slows down, a couple of her friends shyly skating next to her, and Victor nods.

“Not real gold,” he admits, tipping his head to the side so he can match her pace. “I wouldn’t be able to skate on them if they were real gold.”

“Why not?” she asks, with a child’s indignity.

“Well, the metal would be too soft for me to be able to do this.”

Victor lets go of Yuuri, taken in by youthful curiosity, by a stranger’s unfamiliarity with the sport, to speed up and perform a single loop. He spots, enough to track the wall, Yuuri, the gaggle of children, and lands with a flourish.

The little girl’s eyes are wide open and glistening—her mouth, too, in a very American way.

Yuuri darts forward, then, regaining his grip on one of Victor’s hands. He swings around so he’s not between Victor and the child. Skating forward, he squeezes Victor’s hand and leans around him.

With that kind, effusive smile—the one he’s perfected for use on tiny skating fanboys and and underage trainees, the one that seems so natural for him despite the way it’s had to emerge through shyness and introverted lack of charity—Yuuri asks her, “Gold or not, they’re still pretty great, right?”

She grins, one of her top teeth missing. “They’re awesome! I wish I could do that!”

Yuuri’s smile gets just a bit softer when he says, “You don’t need gold skates to be able to do that. Just practice.”

Victor’s heart is pulling too hard at the way Yuuri can draw children away from awe and into the more comfortable space of admiration. At the way the girl’s gaze is drawn between himself and Yuuri, curiosity and reverence and yearning in her eyes warring with the patience in Yuuri’s.

But Victor is too conditioned in the ways of managing a crowd, of managing his own vulnerability in front of said crowd, to say as much. So he turns to his husband and says, “It wouldn’t hurt for you to get some gold skates, Yuuri. Or at least new ones.” He glances significantly down at Yuuri’s well-worn skates—and the girl and at least one of her companions laugh in childish harmony.

Their little noises fade behind him as Yuuri pulls him forward, long strokes speeding them up and taking them toward center ice.

“I can’t take you anywhere,” he mutters.

“But am I wrong? If you’re going to keep competing, you really _should_ buy new skates.”

“You say that every year.”

“And I’m right every year.”

Yuuri sighs. “I never learn…”

Victor has only been to New York once, for a publicity event, but Yuuri has been several times. With Phichit, he’s said—because there’s only so much to do in Detroit and a $100 round trip flight was more than worth the weekend of free drinking at Manhattan’s not-insignificant number of gay bars.

“You would come to this part of town, right?” Victor asks, once their time slot is almost over and they’re trailing lazily around the edge of the rink.

Yuuri nods. “This is where the best places tended to be.” Then he pauses. “Although…”

Victor can feel the spark in his own gaze when he echoes Yuuri’s loaded tone. He repeats, “Although?”

Yuuri’s blush isn’t all that obvious, wind-reddened as he is, but Victor can tell. His smile only deepens when Yuuri explains, “Once we came to the city during the summer. It was crowded, and hot, probably 35ºC and humid as it ever gets in Tokyo. So we took the E from Penn Station to Battery Park.”

Victor cocks his head.

“The train you’d take to the Statute of Liberty,” Yuuri explains. For all that Victor is ostensibly the more worldly of the two of them, Yuuri has had to do significantly more traveling by himself. By train—by cab—by cheap city bus. And for that reason, he’s usually the one scolding Victor on spending too much money on transportation, drawing on maps and pointing out that ‘ _public transportation is easier than you think, you’re so spoiled, Vitenka_.’ “Anyway, by the end of the night, we ended up in some bar—I guess Americans would call it a tavern? But it was kind of… Some kind of historical thing. There was a museum upstairs, and…”

Smile deepening, Victor listens, imagines twenty-one-year-old Yuuri and his baby-faced Thai accomplice, retreating into a quaint little pub that they eventually learned was the haunt of America’s founding fathers.

“And by the end of the night we were raising the roof in George Washington’s tavern.” Yuuri shakes his head while Victor tilts back his head and laughs. “Don’t laugh; it was _not_ good. We should definitely stay as far away as possible.”

(They don’t stay as far away as possible. They take the subway. Victor orders them both the most American-sounding beer on the menu. And then they walk, tipsy, arm-in-arm, in the park while Lady Liberty watches the sunset.)

Victor pays for a ridiculously expensive hotel with a view over Central Park. This rankles Yuuri’s pride a little, makes him snap when Victor tries to get out his wallet to cover their tab at the restaurant after they finish their afternoon skate. Rattled though it might be, Yuuri’s pride doesn’t stop him from gasping at the view when they get back, bringing the cold into the room with them, sunken into the folds of their coats and the spaces between their socks and boots—and opens the curtains and sees the twilit glow. Yuuri’s pride doesn’t stop him from letting Victor press him against the window, doesn’t stop him from letting Victor make love to him against the New York City skyline. Doesn’t stop him from allowing Victor to shift his head forward from where it had fallen against Victor’s shoulder, from taking in the park so many hundreds of meters down, from running his fingers over the glass in wonder, or in gratitude.

 

***

_July 2017_

“So,” Victor says, smiling into his wine but watching over the rim of the glass. “I already asked your father, but I should ask you, too…”

Yuuri’s brow creases. “That’s right, you never did ask them. But it’s a little late to ask for my hand in marriage when the wedding’s next month, Victor.”

“No-” Victor starts, then laughs. He doesn’t always pick up Yuuri’s sarcasm on the first listen; it’s devastating in its flatness. But the sound of his laugh splits Yuuri’s own lips around a repressed smile—one that’s a little hazy with drink. He’s teasing Victor, as he’s become ever more comfortable doing over the last year.

Part of it is that they’re on vacation, of course. They have a bottle of the Valencia region’s best red wine open between them, half emptied already. And while Casa Moñtana isn’t directly on the Mediterranean—like some other, nicer restaurants they could have visited—the nearness of that wine-dark sea suffuses the light of the setting sun. It slants in through the windows, rendering Yuuri all aglow.

The waiter comes by to ask whether they’ll have any more tapas. Victor isn’t hungry, but he’d happily watch Yuuri tilt his head and glance at the menu for as long as the other wants to stay.

A year ago they had stood by a different shore, having a very different conversation about the nature of their relationship. (Different, even, than the other thought they were having; but that’s neither here nor there, at this point.) Six months ago, Victor had taken Yuuri to a wine bar in St. Petersburg, enjoying the flight but half-serious when he pouted at Yuuri’s lack of appreciation. Yuuri had rolled his eyes at him and called him pretentious when they reached a wine that Victor particularly liked. When he’d described it, noting that he could almost taste the Spanish sun, the tang of rain.

Now Yuuri listens to Victor’s suggestions about wine. Remembers the descriptions, the notes. Takes each new varietal in, tastes it, slow, appreciative. Victor loves his little country boy but watching him become more urbane, more cultured, is also a treat. Sophistication doesn’t sharpen his edges the way it does with most people. No; it just makes him more multifaceted. Gives Victor another way to appreciate him, as he sits across the table, golden light on his black hair, sun-kissed and sated on Cariñena wine.

The waiter vanishes after he’s poured them both another glass, with a request to bring the dessert menu. Yuuri turns his full attention back to Victor.

“So what was it you asked my dad?” he continues.

The question jolts Victor a little. But he nods, endures the full weight of Yuuri’s curious gaze. Eyes dark amber with the sun’s dying minutes. Victor’s a little shaky on the inside now, knowing the distraction of the meal is gone—knowing he can’t take it back if Yuuri doesn’t appreciate the gesture. Still, he starts, “Whether it would be alright with your family if we added my name to your family registry. Since I don’t have one, it would-”

Victor cuts himself off. Yuuri’s face has gone totally blank.

“You know about _koseki_?”

Victor gives him little indulgent smile. “I was in Japan for eight months; I did learn a little bit about the culture.”

When the other doesn’t speak, Victor continues, “I still think the laws are archaic, but I don’t mind jumping through this hoop. Even though I’m not a citizen, if I’m technically in your family, I’ll be able to…”

Yuuri blinks. “But I can’t adopt you. Legally. Since you’re older.”

“Ah, I already thought of that.” As he says it, he reaches into his pocket for his cell. He silently curses the tight fitting pants—and their rule that they never have their phones out when they have a meal together—as he struggles to unearth the phone. His fingers may or may not be shaking at this point. “I thought it might be… well, weird if I asked your father to do it himself, but he has a brother, right?”

Victor isn’t sure why he’s asking; he knows, he’s _spoken_ to the man. He wants to shout at himself that this should be simple. This news should be easy to give: it’s just another happy bit of wedding planning. But he flips to the e-mail app and knows that he can’t pretend this doesn’t mean exactly what it does.

And Yuuri isn’t always great with intense sentiment.

He was fooling himself when he thought that this seemed like a simpler thing to do than agree on colors…

(Silver and blue. So many shades of blue… Some just like Yuuri’s jacket from their first pair skate.

Victor still thinks he won that particular compromise.)

He stops himself from shaking his head as he says, “Anyway, your uncle said that he would be willing to do it. Happy to do it, actually. So legally we’d be… cousins, not siblings. I spoke to him over the phone and then he sent me this message. He said he would even go back and re-write his will so that probate doesn’t get me confused with his actual children.”

Yuuri’s blank expression doesn’t change as he takes the phone from Victor—not until he’s read a few lines down the e-mail from his paternal uncle. Then his jaw loosens; his lower lip pokes out a little around his whatever internal reaction he’s having. Victor kind of wants to close his lips for him. Kind of wants to kiss around it, make the emotional moment easier with the physicality of sucking that lip between his teeth. Always, he’s always very distracted by Yuuri’s mouth, one way or another.

Then Yuuri looks up. But not at him, not directly. Maybe like he’s looking over Victor’s shoulder instead of right at him. Victor glances behind himself just in case—and sees only the wall, with its patterned tile, its quirky framed artwork.

He turns back to Yuuri. “What? Was that not good? Should I have asked you first…?”

Victor is dismayed but not all that deeply surprised when the tears come flooding to Yuuri’s eyes. When one traces a smooth line around his full cheek. But Yuuri jolts and reaches up to wipe it away with the heel of his hand. Impatiently. Still watching Victor—or the shoulder of Victor’s suit-jacket, anyway—as he does it.

Excellent. He isn’t going to full-on cry, then. It’s just… shock.

God, Victor hopes it’s shock.

“It _is_ good,” Yuuri says, seeming to catch his breath. Victor feels his own return, new oxygen fire in his lungs. Burning hotter than the alcohol. “It’s wonderful that you asked him. It’s the best thing I’ve heard all… _ever_.”

Grinning in earnest, Victor says, “Good.” Mentally wincing at the repeated word, the inadequacy of it, he inhales, long and fortifying. Then he reaches across the table for Yuuri’s hand. Slowly, smoothly, in a way he hopes will make his fiancé feel as unbalanced as he himself does. Lowers his voice and continues, “I want to be as close to you as possible, Yuuri. I couldn’t think of a better way than to have you _and_ your name.”

Yuuri exhales like he’s been punched in the gut. “The stuff you _say_ sometimes, Victor…”

“It’s just the truth.”

“Yes but not everyone goes around telling the truth like it’s _easy_.”

Victor absolutely does not feel a lump in his own throat when he squeezes Yuuri’s hand. “This is easy, for me.”

Yuuri’s holds his gaze for what is probably the longest he can. He squeezes Victor’s hand in return, and then looks down at it.

“But more importantly. Your name’s iconic in figure skating,” Yuuri adds, his tone still just a little damp. “That can’t be easy to think of giving up.”

Victor shrugs, and it still rings nothing but true when he says, “Sure. But I don’t have any other particular attachment to it.”

“Really?” Yuuri’s nose crinkles. “I actually thought you’d fight me for it. Or that we’d have to combine them.”

Victor makes a face. “Hyphenation is passé. And ‘Nikiforov-Katsuki’ is way too long. Absolutely no one in the world would be able to spell it.”

Now Yuuri smirks. “‘Katsuki-Nikiforov,’ but yes, I agree. That would be too much.”

Victor pouts a little but then says, “Well I guess it’s a good thing we’re just going with ‘Katsuki,’ then.”

Victor can see the possessive look on Yuuri’s face. He wishes he had direct access to that feeling that’s burning in his partner’s gut. Can tell just from the shadow over his eyes that it’s abrupt but strong, burning and heady like the wine they’re still drinking. That they’ve almost finished.

It’s gone as quickly as it came. And then Yuuri is asking him:

“So what did my dad say? I’m assuming yes? And how did you get my uncle involved? And why didn’t you ask both of them, my parents I mean-”

Victor nods affirmations until the the string of questions pulls a laugh out of him. “Your father said he’d ask your uncle. Then he heard your uncle said yes, he said yes. And I didn’t ask them at the same time because I know how your mother latches on to things. Not unlike her son.”

Yuuri smirks, but it’s not as self-deprecating as it would have been a year ago.

“Don’t mistake me—it can be adorable, but I didn’t want to get her attached to an idea if your uncle said no.”

Still smiling slightly, Yuuri says, “But you did ask her eventually.”

Victor chuckles. “Yes, I did. And she cried, too.”

Smile slow to evaporate, Yuuri still shrinks in on himself a little. “I didn’t cry,” he mumbles.

“Much,” Victor concedes.

Yuuri huffs. The very last of the sunset’s desperate rays make their way through the final sip of wine, gold on red, as he knocks it back. Victor doesn’t mind at all that he’s stalling; he gets to watch Yuuri’s blush as it deepens across the highest parts of his cheekbones.

Eventually, Yuuri concludes, “You try reading an e-mail like that from a family member and tell me you wouldn’t be moved.”

Victor picks up his own wine glass again and swirls the remaining half-inch, not quite looking at it. Glass skin-warm against his fingers, it’s a fine, physical diversion from thought as he murmurs, “I really don’t know that I would care that much.”

Yuuri pauses. Victor looks from the sparkling stem of the glass back up into Yuuri’s eyes, seeing understanding there. That thoughtfulness melts into concern. And Victor can’t stand the way worry sends Yuuri’s eyebrows upward, the shadows on his face even more intense in the twilight. So he shakes his head, quickly, and offers his fiancé a tight-lipped smile.

Pressing his lips together, uncertain, Yuuri reaches again for Victor’s hand and—he doesn’t hold him, like Victor expected. Instead, he lightly trails the pads of his fingers over his knuckles. Handles him carefully, like he’s not sure how hard he should press.

Yuuri is a force of nature, to be sure, but he can also be so, so gentle. So tender. Both in how life affects him, and how lightly he treads over certain of its paths. Their relationship is one of those paths, still.

Loving him for it, Victor watches Yuuri’s fingers trail downward over the veins of his hand. Pretending, to save Victor’s pride, to read the dessert menu their waiter had brought to the table at some unknown point.

It’s so perfectly serene that Victor finds himself saying, “You did cry, though. And you know how I get when people cry.”

If Victor is good at anything other than skating, it’s picking at others’ insecurities so savagely that their reactions render his own insecurity nonexistent.

Yuuri takes a second to respond, digits stilling over Victor’s hand, which he’s turned palm-up to toy with the soft skin there. He glances at Victor’s face, eyes still careful, before he seems to come to a conclusion that changes his tentative expression to a capital L look. “I can’t believe I’m marrying someone who would give me such a hard time about being happy.”

Victor preens, inner darkness vanishing as the streetlights outside flicker into being. As the light of empathy flickers, still, behind his lover’s eyes. “But you love me.”

Around his understanding, Yuuri scrunches his nose at him and says, “I wouldn’t be so happy about you going behind my back to ask such an embarrassing question of my parents if I didn’t.”

It’s easy to pout a little when his vulnerability is still so fresh. But he lets Yuuri’s intentional prickliness brush it aside. He’s happy Yuuri gives as good as he gets—as least with Victor. Perhaps especially with Victor. And, more and more, exactly when Victor needs it most.

“ _Yuu_ ri~.” He gives a dramatic sign and tilts his head. “You don’t really think I went behind your back, do you?”

“Well technically-”

“Yuuri.”

“No, Victor, I don’t think you went behind my back. You did it just right.”

Victor feels that the carefree joy on his face is honest. There’s no bravado when he asks, “So you are happy?”

That smile. The same one that Yuuri offered him in the Kyushu airport, the night of their unofficial engagement. “Of course.”

“Wonderful.” His smile echoes Yuuri’s, and he can’t tease him anymore, not when he’s looking at Victor like that. “It’s only because I’m so in love with you that I can even stand to see you cry—but if. Well. I’m glad to be able to make you cry happy tears. Again and again. Tonight as well.”

Victor realizes the second it’s out of his mouth that it sounds a little off key. Sounds that much more suggestive, as its vibrations echo in this space separated by brightly-lit glass from the dusk outside. Yuuri first looks shocked—then contemplative. Victor blinks at him, wondering how he’d let it come out that way. He’d meant to say something profound. Earnest. Instead—not entirely to his disappointment—he’s said something that’s made Yuuri’s face go red and his eyes hungry. As hungry as he was when they got to the restaurant.

He always was faster than Victor to pick up a double entendre.

Their waiter comes to ask whether they’re ordering anything else, and Yuuri waves him away with a polite declination. In Spanish. Surprisingly good Spanish—he’s looking more and more put together the more thoroughly Victor feels himself fall to pieces under that warm brown gaze.

Yuuri waits until they’re in relative privacy again to ask, “Can we get a cab to the hotel?”

“Yuuri!” Victor says in mock-surprise. “I didn’t think you’d be ready to leave without dessert.”

The way Yuuri’s tongue drags over his top lip, flicking back into his mouth with a wet snap that Victor can hear even from across the table. That sound answers his question with a firm: “I’m not.”

It’s cold, in the summer twilight between the restaurant and the inside of the cab. But Victor can taste the Cariñena on Yuuri’s tongue—warm, and not any less exquisite than it was in the glass.

 

***

_January 2017_

Victor will always remember the night of Yuuri’s arrival in St. Petersburg as infinitely sweeter than the day.

And that says something. Because the afternoon is all sweetness. Wondering brown eyes on the folded golden ceiling of the baggage claim at Polkovo Airport. Clear, pale winter light on over Yuuri’s features. Soft fingertips on wrists and waists. Smiles shy but sure.

Yurachka had insisted on accompanying Victor to the airport. (“The katsudon will have extra luggage _and_ your stupid dog, how the hell would it look for Russia if you went throwing out your back before the European Championships?!”) And so he’s waiting for them, phone in hand, folded against the side of the hired car. Yuuri seems touched by this more than by Victor’s own presence. He hurries toward him, and the second Yuri manhandles Yuuri’s backpack away, he pulls the teenager into a side-hug. And he ducks his head against Yuri’s shoulder—probably, Victor thinks, to hide the fact that he’s tearing up—as the blond makes a disgruntled noise at the back of his throat. A noise that anyone who didn’t know him would think is disgruntled, anyway. To Victor it sounds like a purr more than anything else. And Yuuri’s watery smile echoes his understanding.

Once in the car—the two older skaters and Makkachin in the backseat—the teen turns around from his spot beside the driver and lectures Yuuri for a good fifteen minutes about Victor’s lackadaisical approach to practice under Yakov. The genuine irritation that creeps into his tone as he discusses Victor’s undeserved gold at Russian Nationals very nearly hides his jealousy over the fact that both Victor and Yuuri have caught up to his own gold medal. In Yuuri’s mind, Victor knows, the fact that his gold at the Grand Prix Finals means more, technically, than any national title can is nothing compared to the fact that both of them have a medal that _he still doesn’t have_.

He would hate anyone to think this: but like Japanese Yuuri, Yuri is very good at broadcasting his insecurities.

One other thing the boy is very good at is finding food. Good food. So when he shouts, flails, and demands that the car take a left, Victor repeats the request—and adds a “please” for the benefit of the harassed-looking driver.

The noise inside the cafe is similar to that inside Yuuri’s family’s inn: complete with the good-natured shouting of an older lady with a double chin and the joy of feeding the masses in her eyes. But the character of the noise is different, sharper somehow. More Russian, Victor supposes; and he never would have noticed that had he not spent the last eight months on the balmy, southernmost island of Japan. But the smell of bread, of hot chocolate, will—he hopes—be comfort enough to make Yuuri feel like he’s not so very far away from home.

“Coffee’s shit, but the pastry is fantastic,” Yurachka says when they all rise from the little round table. He tosses his cup, empty of whipped cream and cocoa, more aggressively than he needs to into the trash bin before he shoves open the door. “Any of it. Good as home-made. So try something next time, yeah? Don’t let this guy tell you you can’t have any.”

Victor wants to sound stern, but he’s sure his laugh trickles in when he glances between the Yuris and retorts, “I get a bit of a say, as his coach.”

“Some coach.”

The light is going down, throttled between the buildings. But when Yuuri turns to Victor, his eyes catch it all: bright, hot chocolate in the bronzed afternoon. “He is, actually.”

Ahead of them, Yuri rolls his eyes and shoves his hands into his pockets. “Ugh, boring. I hope you’re not planning to just side with him for the rest of the season.”

Yuuri smiles at Yuri’s oblique protectiveness and comments that it’s fine; he thinks the coffee is actually pretty good. At that, Victor notes the cross streets and mentally maps the quickest way here from his apartment.

He also makes it a point, as they wait for the car to come around the block, to watch Yuuri’s gaze track the stone shop fronts, the unfamiliar patterns of paint on the road. Makes it a point to pull him against his side when Yuri yanks his phone from his pocket with adolescent impatience. Makes it a point to hand Yuuri into the car, so he can watch him climb in—because moving to a new place, even with familiar noise, with comforting smells, is a new bruise waiting for careless pressure; because if he hovers a little, maybe he can soften some of the hard impact of landing long-term in a foreign country.

And frankly, because lord god, has he ever missed that ass.

Sudden longing overtakes the delicate peace he’s felt from the second he had Yuuri in his arms again. And it’s too soon, it’s inconvenient: but longing lends heat, and burns the sweetness ’til it’s thin and fragile, like the crust over crème brûlée.

He remembers all too vividly the last time he and Yuuri had had sex. On their last night in Barcelona.

To prepare for Russian Nationals, Victor had had to book a flight for the day after the GPF exhibition skate. The very day after. Absolutely no time to return to Hasetsu, no time even to collect his dog—though over the phone Mama Katsuki had been more than gracious about her promise to care for Makkachin until Yuuri could bring him to St. Petersburg.

That night, flights had been booked, interviews had been given, phone calls had been made; and it had been hours until Victor and Yuuri had been able to fall together against the sheets. Even the banquet had been less than memorable—even with their successful pair skate as the most insistent piece of gossip.

Feasting on every hour that remained before he’d have to leave his student, his lover, Victor had thought that it felt too much like saying goodbye. It’s no wonder the memory comes up now, in the rough, liminal space of an inter-continental move. It had kept Victor company until this moment, this January reunion:

_Yuuri writhing against him, in his lap while Victor dug his fingers into the meat of Yuuri’s thighs, steadily increasing pressure. Yuuri had already asked Victor to fuck him—and Victor would, there was nothing he wanted more, nothing else in the galaxy that would satisfy him, but he would take his time. He would drink in every gasp. He would grind them together through their clothes, knead the plush right underneath the waistband of Yuuri’s boxers until the other was groaning in frustration and in awareness of the late hour. Of the time until of their parting._

_He’d had the younger man wriggle out of his bottoms, eventually, kept him on his knees, chest to chest and dipped his fingers behind, down Yuuri’s spine._

_Grabbing at the heated skin, he’d groaned out: “Remember this.”_

_Yuuri’s laugh had been almost dismissive—but he’d still clung to Victor. “Like I’ll be able to forget. I’m already sore from last night, and you’re just going to make it worse.”_

_Victor had felt vindicated in the hot twist of pleasure that coiled his gut. He wanted to print the reminder of their union into Yuuri’s skin, as deep as he could. Past the level of rings and promises. And Yuuri’s need had echoed his, pressing himself to Victor’s chest as Victor stretched him, bent forward to bite into his shoulder as Victor added a third finger and used the other hand to pinch at the flesh of his ass, supple and rounded and Victor prayed always would be-_

“Are you getting in the car, old man!?”

Victor jumps, guiltily, and does so.

They make it back to Victor’s apartment as the St. Petersburg skyline goes purple, as the yellow of streetlights overwhelms the dusk. It’s cold on the sidewalk between the heated leather interior of the car and the sparse, spare lobby of the apartment building. Makkachin scrambles unhelpfully around everyone’s ankles, and Yuri carries one of Yuuri’s bags from the car to the elevator and past the threshold. No one asks him to, and he bitches about it the entire time, but when he sets it down inside the threshold, he turns to Yuuri and punches his upper arm with a tight little smile that means “I’m glad you’re here” in Russian Punk.

The force of the blow unbalances Yuuri a little, since he’s crouching in the doorway to toe off his shoes. But the grin he gives the boy in return is warm, a pale light in the dim of the apartment.

“You’ve got forty-eight hours to settle in and then Yakov wants you both at the rink,” Yuri threatens, glaring them both down with his hands in his pockets.

Yuuri keeps smiling. “Give me thirty-six. I’m used to jet lag.”

Yuri tries either to clear his throat or snort over the laughter this elicits—either way, it’s not very effective, and Victor knows he and Yuuri both see it when the blond smiles before he turns around.

Over his shoulder, he barks, “Then hurry up and get some sleep. You’re practicing with Team Russia now, Katsudon, and we’re not going to wait for you.”

Standing up fully, Yuuri asks, “You’re not going to stay for a while? Makkachin missed you, Yurio.”

“Don’t call me that,” the teen snaps, reflexively—but sets his hand against the dog’s head when she licks his fingers in agreement. Victor’s heart jumps in his chest, trying to calibrate these mixed images of home. Particularly at the idea that Yuuri is already comfortable enough to invite someone to stay over at the apartment—but he barely has time to enjoy the way warmth thrums against his ribs as Yuri asks, “I’m taking the car home, Victor?”

“Of course,” he answers. He tries to keep his smile as neutral as possible while Yuri jerks a nod at him and shuts the door.

The flurry of it all dissipates with Yuri’s retreat. Makkachin sits patiently between the two men in the doorway. Then Victor closes his hand over Yuuri’s when it goes for the handle of his backpack. Closer than anything since that first initial hug at the gate—which had really been more a tackle than anything else—the contact makes Yuuri blush and look down. But it takes Victor’s breath away.

“Leave it,” he says, with the little air he has left.

And Yuuri steps into his space. Victor’s heart beats harder, kicked back into overdrive when those gentle brown eyes meet his. They seem to move at the same time and meet in the middle—not that Victor cares who starts it, he’s just eager to get his hands on Yuuri.

They fling their coats over the rack; Yuuri unwinds himself from his scarf while Victor tries and fails to be helpful. And then they make their way through the darkened half of the apartment. Retreating from the lights he had flipped on in the entryway, he wouldn’t even have thought to turn any of them off, except that Yuuri murmurs against his lips, “We should leave a light on for her,” and then gestures to where Makkachin is making herself comfortable against the throw pillows on Victor’s couch.

Victor nods, adding a poetic, “Uh huh,” and snakes his hand up the back of Yuuri’s one-size-too-big sweatshirt.

Sultry shadow deepens as they draw away from the light. He laughs into the wet heat of Yuuri’s mouth, at his conscientiousness and at their mutual ardor—however differently shaped. His lover has never even seen his bedroom and now they’re stumbling toward it in the dark.

They don’t go for anything fancy. Yuuri pulls him down on the bed until Victor is pinning him against the carefully made-up duvet. Victor presses his forehead to Yuuri’s, takes in the travel-worn smell of him, slides his forearms against his own bedding. He thinks that the sensory orchestra, the scent of one home and the friction-hot feeling of the other, will be his undoing.

When they’re both hard and impatient from kissing, Victor balance his weight on his knees and drags the backs of his fingers down Yuuri’s sides, thumbs his way past Yuuri’s waistline. He slides his partner’s pants down while he kicks off his own. Lacking the patience to finish even that task, Victor rucks Yuuri’s shirt up to his chest and mouths at his stomach.He grips Yuuri’s hips, distracting him with the dip of his tongue into his navel, before pulling back, taking his erection in as far as he can manage, down into his throat, too eager, too impatient to bother with teasing him.

With Yuuri squirming and dragging his heels down Victor’s back, Victor doesn’t think it’s going to take very long at all—and it doesn’t. Yuuri tries to pull him off before he comes but Victor just grabs Yuuri’s wrist and shoves that hand into his own hair, breathing hard through his nose and swallowing Yuuri down.

One of Victor’s hands absentmindedly palms his own cock through his briefs. It’s just seconds after he rests his cheek against Yuuri’s hip that he feels the other stir, tentative fingers sliding over his shoulders.

“C’mere,” Yuuri says, nudging Victor up until his weight is over Yuuri, caging him in again. Gently, lovingly, Yuuri knocks Victor’s hand away from himself, reaches to pull the remaining fabric down Victor’s hips, wraps his hand around his dick. As Yuuri thumbs at the head, his breath catches; and even though Victor is the one closing his eyes against perfect, long-overdue sensation, it’s Yuuri who breathes Victor’s name. Like he still can’t believe he’s doing this. Still can’t comprehend that it is, in fact, Victor who is warm and willing in his arms. Who is as desperate for him as any living creature can be for another.

Victor’s heartbeat shoots off erratically and he looks up into Yuuri’s flushed face, traces Yuuri’s jaw with damp fingertips to ground himself. He feels so safe, so secure that it should be embarrassing how thoroughly he lets himself fall, how short the seconds are before he’s pressing his face against Yuuri’s neck and moaning out his climax.

Should be. Should means nothing, when what _is_ of the moment is so heavenly, so perfect.

He’s gone boneless, even though he’d tried to keep his dead weight off the man beneath him. Yuuri helps him shift to the side, shoving him over so he can throw one leg over Victor’s and curl against his chest.

Twisting a few strands of Yuuri’s hair around his fingers, he notices the few extra centimeters and wonders, absently, if Yuuri is growing it out on purpose. It’s either that, or, perhaps more likely, he’s just forgotten to keep it neat during the space between competitions.

He asks, “How do you feel?”

“Good,” Yuuri answers. His voice grows a little clearer when he continues. “Hungry.”

Grin splitting over his face, Victor ruffles Yuuri’s hair—the other makes a vague noise of protest—and says, “I bet you’re tired, too. It’s a long flight. I have some frozen things, do you want me to throw something in the oven so we can eat and get to bed?”

Yuuri traces his fingers over Victor’s still-clothed chest. “…No.”

Victor peers down, trying to see Yuuri’s face. “Did you want to go out, then? We can probably find something but since it’s not a tourist-heavy season…”

Shaking his head, Yuuri scrunches himself against Victor’s side. Then he raises his eyes to meet Victor’s. His face is a little red, his neck too—but whether it’s the fading sex flush or new color, he can’t tell.

“Yes to the food,” Yuuri clarifies. And that’s definitely increasing color on his face. He adds, maintaining eye contact, “No to the going to bed.”

Victor’s smile goes sharp. “I see.”

So they pad their way back into the kitchen. Makkachin is apparently tired enough from the long flight that she just whuffs at them from her comfortable spot on the couch, just flicks her tail absently when the common area begins to smell of the decadence of carbs from the toaster oven. Yuuri and Victor sit on either side of her, drinking black tea with lemon while they wait for their food. They talk absently about the routine Yuuri has been keeping over the temporary separation. About how Victor had been guilty enough about missing the new year in Japan—which he had promised Mama Katsuki that he would see—that he had made himself stay awake, making his first call of the new year to her.

They indulge in the warmth of the furry creature between them, of the hot drink and the bready something-or-other Victor had pulled from his freezer. Long enough that Victor starts to meld with the designer fabric, lulled to satisfaction. But Yuuri’s fingers against his neck draw him from the soft glow of half-dreams to the solid warmth of the actual vision in front of him. Victor lets Yuuri draw him up, off the couch, back through the dark of the apartment. Yuuri leads—even though he takes a strange path around the furniture, even though, again, it’s _Victor’s_ bedroom they’re headed toward. His fingers grasp Victor’s wrist, light, delicate on the thin skin of over the bones there, and Victor thinks: he wouldn’t have it any other way.

He thinks how much Yuuri has grown, here. It isn’t dissimilar from the way he’d gained confidence on the ice. And the fact that he continues to let Victor help increase his confidence in both areas? That’s a privilege he can still barely believe he’s earned.

Needy from the start, eager but still shy, Yuuri was open to Victor’s guidance as they learned one another with hands and lips, teeth and tongue. When they’d decided to go further, after Rostelecom, he’d been shy—but receptive. He’d let Victor hold him, guide him the first few times he bottomed. It’s always easier, a little less overwhelming, to be on your back, at first. Victor understands, remembers what that was like—even if he himself had hid it all behind blithe bravado, when he was young and inexperienced.

Yuuri doesn’t hide anything from him, even when that shyness dictates the way he opens himself up to Victor.Falling overwhelmed and flushed beneath Victor, letting Victor do exactly as he wants with every part of him. Victor loves the way Yuuri melts into the sheets while Victor bites his way up from hips, across abs, over his chest; licks up the sweat caught at the tendons in his neck; presses sweet, light kisses over every part of his face, his chin, the full cheeks, his temples. He loves that surrender just as much as he loves the way Yuuri gets impatient and demanding once Victor starts trailing a hand trails downward along the path of the reddening marks he’s left to palm at him.

It had taken several weeks (and more than a couple glasses of wine after the Grand Prix Final) before Yuuri worked up the courage to ask if he could top. Which he’d done beautifully, shaking and overwhelmed but oh so attentive. So sweet.

Yuuri’s attentiveness hasn’t changed over there three weeks or so that they’ve been apart. But the distance has lent spice to his sweetness.

When they reach Victor’s bedroom, Yuuri is the one who presses his back to the door until it clicks. The one who shoves Victor down on the bed and, as he climbs up after him, sways just this side of purposeful. Angles too enticing to be accidental.

Encounters like this, where Yuuri gets his initial shyness out of the way after the first orgasm—or when they’ve been teasing each other for so long that they crash into bed and into each other like starving animals—are the ones that turn Victor into the needy, breathless one, going along delighted and tremulous from the inside out.

The side of Yuuri that comes out his first night in Saint Petersburg is all eros. No selfishness; no self-consciousness. Pure seduction.

Yuuri has to hunt a little for the supplies that Victor keeps at his bedside—because Victor himself is too gone to help. He’s too undone, fallen into too many pieces to do anything other than trail his fingers over Yuuri’s skin while Yuuri’s twisted away from him, digging around in an unfamiliar drawer—too overwhelmed by the perfect pressure of the kiss Yuuri offers him when he drapes himself against Victor—too knocked out with pleasure to do anything other than offer Yuuri a groan that is more breath than vibration, when Yuuri finally gets a finger inside him.

Against the flesh of Victor’s inner thigh, Yuuri says, “You sound relieved.”

It’s a strange role reversal when Victor feels himself go red from the bridge of his nose to his chest. When he says, “Shut up.” He catches his breath a little, so he can put more tone behind rasping syllables. In his sultriest murmur, he says, “You love that I love this.”

And Victor does love it. He adores the way Yuuri’s hands feel on him. Had since the very first time the other man had brushed electric-tipped fingers against his cheek on that gala dance floor, last December. Loves every bit of contact that Yuuri initiates. It’s precious. Because it’s a little less common—with Yuuri’s cultural baggage and his wide bubble of personal space, that’s not surprising—but every time? So sincere.

Yuuri, for his part, is biting his lower lip and nodding. He goes very red, and when Victor sees his top teeth dig down into the soft flesh of his mouth, Victor breathes and is ready for the second digit.

He’s not ready for Yuuri’s cock against him; he’s not sure if he’ll ever be—not sure that he ever _wants_ to be ready for the way Yuuri splits him open and fills him up. For their mirrored pulse at the point of connection. Knowing he’s already greedy for it, Victor doesn’t settle in with his back against the sheets. He’s not content with the ordinary fullness, not when he knows exactly how overwhelmed he can be-

Victor turns with his lover still half-buried inside him, swings his knee through the space between their bodies until he’s lying on his side. Yuuri’s so good at reading Victor’s body language now, he automatically catches at his thigh and brings it closer to his own chest.

But he’s a little thrown off, still, looking at Victor with wide eyes and balancing hard on one hand. Softly—by necessity, he’s got no room left to take a deeper breath than the one he needs to form a half-whisper—Victor smiles and says, “If you can… kind of drive from underneath, I’ll see stars.”

It works like magic, especially when Yuuri finds his rhythm and his face goes from lost to found. When Victor can still wind back and kiss him.

In that rare but wonderfully possessive voice, Yuuri tells him, “If you can still kiss me, you’re not seeing enough stars.” And he shows them to Victor. Becomes a nebula. Victor starts outright trembling— _vibrating_ like the core of an unstable atom, and with Yuuri nosing at the back of his neck, and him able to reach back and slide a hand into Yuuri’s hair…

Yuuri asks, “Can I come inside you?”

It’s a little frantic, like it might be too late even if Victor says no—but Victor just nods, would have agreed anyway, says, “Whatever you want, anything-”

‘ _I’d give you the world, Yuuri. Just, please—give me yours in return for it_.’

 

***

_April 2017_

“They don’t have _katsudon_ , as far as I could tell, but I’ve been told it’s the nicest restaurant for Japanese cuisine in the city.”

They have a view over St. Isaac’s Cathedral from their seat by the window of Sintoho. Yuuri’s eyes go from it, to Victor, to the little flickering candle between them.

“That doesn’t matter.” There’s a half-smile on Yuuri’s face as he speaks. Victor already can’t wait to get him home and taste that absent expression. “I’m sure it’ll be great.”

Then he notices the fault in Yuuri’s voice. Not a quake, barely scraping. The whole world may have been familiar with Yuuri’s more theatrical display of emotions, but Victor is one of the only ones who knows his minute tells. The glare from the restaurant lights against paneled glass reflects over his features and renders them luminescent; but behind his glasses, his eyes are over-bright.

Victor sucks in a breath and reaches across the distance of the table. It’s only as he takes Yuuri’s hand in his that he notices he was so excited to get them here that he hasn’t even taken off his gloves.

“Oh Yuuri, I’m sorry.”

Now Yuuri’s face does fall a little, but in bewilderment. “For what?”

Victor shakes his head. “I should’ve picked something different, I wasn’t thinking—you probably don’t need more reminders that you’re not at home.”

Yuuri laughs, squeezes Victor’s hand in turn. “What do you mean? I told you, it’s great. It’s a beautiful place. And I _have_ been away from home before, if you recall- Ah, you’re still wearing these, let me…”

As Yuuri pulls his gloves off for him, Victor pulls a face. “If you’re homesick, you can tell me.”

“I’m not,” Yuuri answers, almost mutters, as he moves to press Victor’s gloves into the pocket on the inside of his own blazer. For reasons he doesn’t want to examine too closely right now, this sends a shiver down Victor’s spine.

Still, he prods. “Are you sure?”

Shrugging, Yuuri covers the warm skin of Victor’s now bare hand with his own. He says, “I mean, in a perfect world, I would live somewhere I could always see everyone—you, _and_ my family, and Phichit, and Yuuko and Nishigori…”

“I’m sorry,” Victor says again, feeling useless.

Yuuri smiles at him, beatific. “Don’t be. We don’t live in a perfect world and… Um. There’s literally nowhere in the world I’d rather be.”

Victor sighs his relief as he takes in the faint color over Yuuri’s cheeks; he can see the pattern even in candlelight, can anticipate that bloom of blood vessels. He starts to settle back against his own seat when Yuuri pinches the back of his wrist, lightly, halting his progress.

“Although,” he continues. “You’d think if you put so much time into planning an anniversary dinner, you would have had time to think that particular issue through. You’re so absentminded, sometimes.”

Victor pouts and withdraws his hand. “Don’t give me a hard time after you’ve already forgiven me, that’s mean…”

He can tell by the curve of Yuuri’s mouth—it’s too sweet to be called a smirk—that if they were in less polite company he would be reaching out to ruffle Victor’s hair. He asks, “How can I possibly keep surprising you if I don’t give you a hard time once in a while?”

Playfully, Victor tilts his head up and puts a finger to his chin. “Well you’re certainly giving me a hard time about that quad flip. It’s inconsistent. The waiting gives me a heart attack every time you do it in competition.”

The color that had been fading from Yuuri’s face returns with interest. “I take it back; I don’t forgive you,” he says, in Japanese.

In the same language, Victor replies, “Yes, you do.”

Yuuri can’t maintain his glare for longer than a couple seconds. His face softens with a smile and an airy laugh, and Victor thinks: he can’t wait to catalogue the way Yuuri’s face melt into laughter from each and every expression of which he’s capable.

They order a bottle of warm sake. It reminds them both of the hot springs; Victor loves it, even if the temperature keeps Yuuri from drinking too much of it. Though, Victor tells him he’s welcome to get as annihilated as he wants, since he knows who he’s going home with. This earns him a half-hearted kick to his ankle under the table.

“That mouth makes your insight dangerous, you know,” Yuuri says, once they’re both a couple glasses in.

Victor tilts his head. He’s not as un-self-aware as most people think; but he wants Yuuri to explain, wants to know what Yuuri thinks of him without having to ask.

“It’s a unique ability,” Yuuri continues, “to be able to make people feel like shit without even being _mean_ about the truth. You just tell people what they already know and it eats them up.”

Victor hums, nodding. “I suppose.”

“But you can be…” Yuuri frowns, like he’s not sure he wants to share this part.

“I can be what?” Victor prompts.

“Well. You can also be really kind about it, in your own way. About the truth. It’s like, you tell it accurately, but in exactly the way people need to hear it.”

Victor goes silent, and wondering. Yuuri isn’t always the most verbally eloquent, but when he is, he has the ability to take Victor’s breath away.

“…It’s one of the things I love about you, too, you know,” Yuuri continues.

“Too?”

It’s totally incongruent; Yuuri says it like they’ve picked up the thread of a prior conversation, and Victor is thrown until Yuuri says, “That you have so many faces—”

Victor flashes back: four in the morning, in his apartment, on a transcontinental call with a Yuuri who seemed convinced that Victor found him two-faced instead of gorgeously multifaceted.

“And there are some faces you only show to me.” Yuuri shakes his head, looks down like he’s wondering how that can be right. “That’s- It’s one of the things about you that always surprises me.”

Victor isn’t sure how to respond. He’s an elevator panel and someone has hit all his buttons. It’s not what people tend to see about him, that there’s more going on behind his eyes than the flashbulbs of news cameras suggest. People see the one note—the charm, the fame. And he’s not sure how to tell his lover that the reason Yuuri can see all his other facets is that Yuuri is one of the only people in the world Victor has felt safe enough to show them to.

So instead, he equivocates. Around a lump in his throat—that only makes his voice a little tight, thank you very much—he says, “I love that about this, too.”

Victor reaches the short distance over the table to take Yuuri’s hand, so he can have no doubt about what Victor means when he says, “this.” Yuuri looks up again, eyes imperfect garnet in the low light.

“About our relationship,” he clarifies, anyway. Softly, Victor smiles. “It has so many faces.”

“Victor…”

Yuuri looks a little like he wants Victor to stop talking, to stop before he says anything embarrassing—and more than a little like he wants to tighten his grip on Victor’s hand.

So Victor continues, “A year ago I became your coach. But we’ll be able to celebrate other anniversaries, too. I could probably think of one for every month.”

“We’d never stop celebrating.” Yuuri rolls his eyes, but looks pleased.

“Exactly,” Victor grins. “November: First kiss. December: First dance.”

“And the engagement.”

Victor’s smile becomes a grin; Yuuri is proud that that one is due to him. As he should be.

“And the engagement,” Victor agrees. “August: the wedding. Sooner rather than later.”

Yuuri blushes at that. Swallows. Then adds, “July. The first time one of us used the L-word.”

“Love? Ah…” Victor tips his head; he can’t quite place the date for that one, because in his mind, he’s used it from the moment they met.

“You said it…” Yuuri gives a shaky breath. “You said it first. On the beach, last July.”

The tip of Victor’s head becomes a full-on tilt. “…Did I?”

Now Yuuri grins. “You don’t remember that you said not letting me off easy is ‘how you show your love’?”

“Do I remember every grandiloquent statement I make? No, I guess not.”

“Every what?” Yuuri laughs.

Their relationship is like this: like their ever-shrinking language barrier. It’s a constant shift toward perfect understanding.

Perfect crystallization.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so grateful to [Johanna](http://intothevoidofarts.deviantart.com) for creating the art for this fic! (LOOK at that banner you guys. I didn't even notice until today that there's a date inside the ring and now I am crying.)
> 
> A lot of very kind and talented people helped me polish and fitness, here - [AWheelchairGirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/learninghowtobreathe/pseuds/AWheelchairGirl), [jacksqueen16](http://archiveofourown.org/users/jacksqueen16/pseuds/jacksqueen16) and [Muse](https://twitter.com/museawayfic) each did a wonderful beta and I am eternally grateful. And the katsudonbang community on Twitter certainly helped with motivation! Please check out the other Mini Bang art/fic combinations!
> 
> Re: the image song. I loved this quote: “Prokofiev, for a Russian, is a symbol of light, of rhythm and of life.” So, predictably, I went to Prokofiev with this fic—where I wanted to use light as image inspiration to explore Victor’s life and love. The repeated theme in all those different instruments and modes is a pretty good representation of the snippets here. (It might also interest you to note that the main melody is used in the song “Russians” by Sting. XD)
> 
> Do let me know if you enjoyed yourself! Kudos, comments,  
> [tumblr message](http://utlaginn.tumblr.com), smoke signals. Your comments make the excessive amount of time I spend writing this couple seem slightly less ridiculous…


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